Joe Firmage

Infobox Celebrity
name = Joe Firmage


caption =
birth_date = birth date and age|1970|9|26
birth_place = Salt Lake City, Utah
occupation = Chief Executive Officer of ManyOne
Board of Directors of Digital Universe
website = [http://www.manyone.net/about/management/joe-firmage.html Profile]

Joseph Firmage (born October 26, 1970 in Salt Lake City, Utah) is an American Internet entrepreneur. He founded several business ventures prior to and during the dot-com boom and currently is involved with two closely linked organizations: ManyOne Networks of which he is CEO, and the Digital Universe Foundation of which he is a co-founder and member of the Board of Directors.

Early business career: Serius, Novell, USWeb

Firmage attended the University of Utah, where his father was a law professor, on a physics scholarship but only stayed through his sophomore year. In 1989 he started his first company, Serius, which grew out of a Macintosh program he had written for his mother's greeting card business. Serius produced developer tools for object-oriented programming. The company received funding from several sources, including Novell, which ultimately bought Serius for $24 million in 1993. Its product then became the basis for AppWare, while Firmage became vice president of strategic planning for Novell's NetWare division.Cox, Ed. " [http://microbrew.netfirms.com/history.html A brief history of Microbrew] ".]

Firmage left Novell in 1995 when the company decided to focus its business on networking products.Cox, John. "Novell's AppWare tools are reborn at start-up company". "Network World", 25 March 1996.] (Later, Firmage would explain the departure as a disagreement over Novell's strategy in selling its Unix licensing rights and a failure to compete with Microsoft in the network operating system market.Firmage, Joe. " [http://news.com.com/2010-7344-5083904.html Perspective: An open-source letter] ". "CNET News.com", 1 October 2003.] ) He started a new company, Network Multimedia, to buy the AppWare technology back from Novell. The product was eventually renamed Microbrew, but the company disappeared after a few years.

Meanwhile Firmage, together with two other former Novell executives, Toby Corey and Sheldon Laube and two other outside executives, Jim Heffernan and Ken Campbell, also founded USWeb during this period.Nerney, Chris. " [http://www.networkworld.com/netresources/0602isp2.html USWeb buys six of its affiliates] ". "NetworkWorld", 21 April 1997.] Originally a Web design company, USWeb grew with a series of acquisitions into an Internet consulting firm, following a strategy of buying businesses with expertise in corporate intranets and extranets. USWeb stock became publicly traded in December 1997, as the company sought to achieve critical mass in an atmosphere Firmage acknowledged was an Internet bubble.Mark Gimein. " [http://www.thestandard.com/article/0,1902,193,00.html Playing the Price] ". "The Industry Standard", 1 May 1998.]

With Firmage as CEO, USWeb continued its expansion and ultimately merged with a rival Web consulting firm, CKS Group. Firmage was originally announced as CEO of the merged company, but was replaced by Robert Shaw in November 1998 while the merger was underway. Initially Firmage took the new title of chief strategist, then left the company entirely in January 1999,Gray, Douglas F. " [http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayStory.pl?990111.eifirmage.htm Founder of USWeb quits over UFO views] ". "InfoWorld", 11 January 1999] , saying that continuing publicity about his campaign to prove the existence of UFOs would damage the company's reputation.

Extraterrestrial and astrophysics interests

Around the time of Firmage's departure, word began to circulate about his belief in extraterrestrial intelligences, which was the subject of a book he wrote called "The Truth".Borland, John. " [http://news.com.com/2100-1017-219270.html USWeb founder on quest for ET truth] ". "CNET News.com", 18 December 1998.] Published online at www.thewordistruth.org, it contended that extraterrestrials had appeared on Earth periodically to help spur human technological advancement. For example, important elements of modern technology were explained as deriving from an alien spacecraft supposedly recovered from the 1947 Roswell UFO incident. Firmage also related his own contact with an otherworldly figure, shortly before the USWeb IPO, with whom he discussed space travel. ``...he has sunk more than $3 million into establishing Project Kairos (after an ancient Greek word meaning ``the right or opportune moment") to prepare mankind for aliens."Swartz, Jon. " [http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1999/01/09/MN19158.DTL CEO Quits Job Over UFO Views] ". "San Francisco Chronicle", 9 January 1999.]

Tim Sebastian of BBC’s HARDtalk interviewed Mr. Firmage about his alien encounter several years after publication of “The Truth”. [Quotations excerpted from [http://www.firmage.org/i/uploads/bbc-hard-talk.mov BBC video] , retrieved March 19, 2008]

Fir
I still don’t know what it was. It could have been a relatively mundane rare experience in consciousness, it could have been a bad potato… it could have been a nightmare. Its not like I leaped out of bed and said “Well, I’ve had a vision. I’m gonna go, you know, start a science research institute or something like that. All it served to do I’d say, is punctuate a rising appreciation of some of the larger issues that we all confront together as a human family.

Interviewer: It did more than punctuate, it changed your life quite radically didn’t it?

Fir
This is one of the misperceptions that been circulating in some of the press that have described that event. It wasn’t that event in my opinion, which changed my world view.

Interviewer: …From a very successful entrepreneur, someone who started up two companies, very successfully, made a huge amount of money, there you were, about to change course. If it wasn’t that event that caused you to change course, what was it?

Fir
A glimpse of a way through many of the deepest challenges that human society faces. And that has a lot to do with the science in science that were hinted at in the paper I read that night. It was in fact the scientific question that I had begun to study again, that I’d left before in school eight--then eight years before--that awakened my attention to new possibilities.